Hawk boys still liked to see Crows jump when they flashed steel. She wouldn’t forget twice.
Pa pressed something small, hard, and familiar into Fie’s palm. His voice rose. “You two will stay back to mind the fire. No call to salt it without sinners. Meet us at the haven shrine once it’s burned low. Everyone else, we’re clearing out.”
“Flint,” Hangdog called as the other Crows grabbed their cart-ropes. “It’s still in the cart.”
Pa shook his head, pointing at Fie. “No need.”
She uncurled her fist. A single milk tooth waited there, gleaming bright against her fingers. Startled, she looked to Pa.
He just nodded. “Go on, girl.”
Fie set her other hand over the Phoenix tooth, rolling it betwixt her palms like a gambler about to throw a shell. It only took a moment’s focus to find the spark of old life buried deep within, a ghost slumbering in bone. This was unlike any spark she’d dug up before—but Pa wouldn’t give her aught she couldn’t conquer.
Closing her eyes, Fie pulled her hands apart. The spark broke free.
She saw silk and gold, sandstone courtyards, a fist thrust into fire before a cheering, jewel-dusted crowd. No hunger, no fear, only the weight of terrible ambition. Then, like the beast before, it vanished—all but a flickering heat still in the palm of her hand.
She opened her eyes. The tooth was burning.
Fie felt no pain, even though the rag strips wrapped about her palm had begun to char. Fire wouldn’t harm a Phoenix, nor, it seemed, the witch who called royal ghosts. The small flame burned bright, pure gold, as if Fie held sunlight itself. She rolled her shirtsleeve from elbow to shoulder and focused on the spark once more. Fragments came to her: archery practice, a lover waiting in the amber-pod gardens, a ceremony committing the teeth of a dead uncle to the viatik stash … then, at last, what she’d sought. Candle-flame, winding round fingers like a purring kitten.
Fie clung to the way the dead Phoenix had threaded the fire with his will, then sought the answering hum in her own bones. One rattled up her spine. She’d called out the spark, joined it to her own power. Now it was time to make it sing.
With her head and her heart and all of her bones, Fie pulled.
The tooth erupted in her outstretched hand. Heat blasted through the clearing, gasps turning to awed curses as too-bright flames clawed at the stars.
The first time Pa had spoken to Fie of being a witch, he’d started with the gods.
Eons ago, he’d told her, when the thousand gods had founded their castes and chosen their graves, they’d left one final blessing before they died: a Birthright for every caste.
Every caste, that was, save the Crows.
The gods who begat the Crows had a bad sense of humor. Crows came into the world with no blessings, but their witches had a gift all the same. It was why other castes called them bone thieves: their gift was stealing Birthrights.
In the years after, she’d learned the ways of a Crow witch under Pa’s watchful eye. She could call any Birthright from the cast-off bones of the living or the dead, as long as its spark lasted for her.
But why, she’d asked long ago, did the thousand gods have to die?
And Pa had answered: Everything has a price, Fie. Especially change. Even Phoenixes need ash to rise from. Do you know how many witches there are in Sabor?
She’d shaken her head.
One thousand, Pa had told her. We had to rise from something.
She’d never wholly believed it. She’d never once felt like a god.
But with fire, the Birthright of royals, howling in the palm of her hand, Fie felt like one now.
She took a breath and reeled the fire back to a respectable blaze, but a prickle on her neck said eyes still lingered on her. Sure enough, the Hawk’s thin squint was one she knew too well. It belonged to someone adjusting how they’d first sized her up.
The prince, on the other hand, looked appalled. Fie reckoned he didn’t like the sight of divine Phoenix fire in her low-caste hands—then she saw that no witch-sign adorned either of his.
The dead gods had left their graves as havens for their castes, sites where Birthrights were heightened to rival even a witch’s power. The royal palace squatted atop every single Phoenix god-grave in Sabor, less a haven and more a show of strength. Within its walls, any of Ambra’s line could call some